Friday, April 15, 2016

timewar crux

Humanity's perennial conflict with its own time constraints is now in a state of global crisis. The lethal anachronism of nuclear weapons is alive & well in our polity, & our sustained ecological criminal negligence has now put us on a par with the space debris that ended the age of dinosaurs. Innovations which can liberate time & opportunities seem all too often instead to remove them, at exactly the historical moment that can most ill afford their absence.

Time liberation will likely determine how much farther the weird beauty of the human project has left to advance.

2 comments:

Since time war has no need to obey any rules of war, this modern crux sees both antithetical forces boldly struggling toward victory: the perverse (& tragically mundane) contemporary personal failure either to use the 24 hours in every day to one's benefit or to either defeat or transcend their inadequacy coexists with radical advances in engineering & design that can spawn the single greatest social revolution since the rise of humanism during the Italian Renaissance.

Market culture is subjecting its interior functional time scale* to reduction - weekly net profits are supplanting quarterlies as the focus, & presumably microtrading can quickly wind up dictating trance-like dedication to tracking regional, global or demographic investment trends by the minute as a precondition for maintaining market dominance. That both its endgame & its ongoing prelude to said endgame are a victory for nihilism (or at best eschatological morbidity run amok) merits attention & serious civic concern.

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* As it does likewise to the time scale of informal human culture at large. Corporate influence on the arts & sciences is at its quantitative apex ... the impersonal, too, is political.